[NikolaNovak]

>>government would stop trying to micromanage the economy

Right, but some of us are not religious, so proposals needs a little bit more than the blind faith of "take your hands off the wheel and I'm sure everything will magically be better for everybody, particularly the poor".

[AtlasBarfed]

Deregulation has not lead to a utopia of competition in free markets, rather virtually every market is a cartel or monopoly with heavy regulatory capture.

This is probably the best example of government lack of regulation, considering that their ample laws against monopoly's, cartels and duopolies from the days of Teddy Roosevelt's administration

They are effectively not enforced, or if enforcement is attempted corporate legal departments now have an effective means of defeating them since the Microsoft trial

[pdonis]

> Deregulation has not lead to a utopia of competition in free markets, rather virtually every market is a cartel or monopoly with heavy regulatory capture.

You're contradicting yourself. You can't have "regulatory capture" and "deregulation" at the same time.

As a matter of actual fact, we do have lots of regulatory capture, which has resulted in huge swaths of regulation that favors large corporations who can afford lobbyists, and disfavors smaller business that actually are the most productive part of our economy. With what results, we see.

> They are effectively not enforced

Antitrust law enforcement has indeed been irregular since they were passed--but what enforcement has been done has done more harm than good. The classic cases of antitrust enforcement, such as Standard Oil or Alcoa Aluminum, resulted in higher prices and scarcer products for consumers--i.e., a negative impact, not a positive impact.

However, antitrust laws are a very small part of the total body of regulations that affect businesses. It's just that most of those regulations are written by executive branch bureaucrats instead of Congress. The Federal Register is much larger than the United States Code, and includes much more detailed micromanagement of all kinds of business activities. Which, again, favors the large corporations that bought those regulations in order to hamstring their competitors, smaller businesses who are more productive but less able to absorb the costs of compliance with that huge mass of regulations.

[AtlasBarfed]

I am not contradicting myself. Laws that breaks up companies that are too large is totally different than complex approval/regulatory commissions where internal lobbying and various other advantages give you the keys to the castle

The only regulatory capture in play against antitrust is bribery of the judicial system officials, which we now know is rampant, and employing executive and congressional pressure on the DoJ, which obviously exists.

[wolverine876]

It worked really well historically, before central banks, Keynes, Friedman ...

[NikolaNovak]

I genuinely don't know if that's extremely snarky sarcasm or extremely earnest opinion.

(if I said it it would be completely sarcastic, but some people do idealize the far past and probably mean it honestly, presumably because they mentally imagine / assume they wouldn't be in one of the sucky classes of society)

[wolverine876]

Government likes to terrify people with stories of depression (and fascism and climate change) in order to grab more power for themselves and the elite. If you play the game then you too can get paid - get a PhD, keep your eyes down and march like they say, and they'll pay you to play with numbers that make them look credible.

But people are waking up. The Internet has democratized information (sorry, it's popularized it), and now the elite gatekeepers in colleges can't stop anyone from gathering economic data with their own eyes and doing economic analysis. I can see how much a loaf of bread costs; I can see my basket of goods and my supermarket receipt.

Just kidding. I really think the lack of humanities education, especially history and literature, makes people - especially in SV and the wider less-educated world - very vulnerable to this nonsense. It's transparent nonsense if you understand it, but if you toss away generations of understanding about its technique and manipulative power and effects, you are a babe in the woods.

"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." - Cicero

[NikolaNovak]

The tricky bit is interwebs make sarcasm really hard to detect, especially when today there's ample real and honest examples of extreme opinions along any given scale. I may be socially inept, but I'm still perplexed as to which of the couple of different points of view separated by "just kidding" phrase you are genuinely putting forward; apologies if I'm being obtuse, it is not deliberate.

[wolverine876]

'Just kidding' refers to what's above it. Sorry for the confusion; it wasn't intended but I can understand it.

[ponow]

So people should ignore their expenses going way up, and not bother plotting them or whatever because...?